Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Our Complicity In War-Rape

“Wombs punctured with guns. Women raped and
tortured in front of their husbands and children. Rifles forced into vaginas.
Pregnant women beaten to induce miscarriages. Foetuses ripped from wombs. Women
kidnapped, blindfolded and beaten on their way to work or school. We saw the
scars, the pain and the humiliation. We heard accounts of gang rapes, rape
camps and mutilation. Of murder and sexual slavery. We saw the scars of
brutality so extreme that survival seemed for some a worse fate than death” [i]

Women’s rights are human rights. However, as it currently stands
today, pregnancies arising out of war rape –
that is to say that girls and women raped in armed conflict - are currently denied
abortions on humanitarian and medical grounds due to the US government’s “no
abortion policy” which affects medical treatment services funded by the UK
government, and despite the fact the UK government is under a multi-tiered legal
obligation to provide it.

The
Geneva Convention requires non-discriminatory medical care be provided, whether
by the state in conflict or by others. In 1979, the U.N. General Assembly adopted
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The ratification obligations
include provisions: to reduce sex trafficking;
to provide access to education and training; to ensure the right to vote; to
end forced and child marriages; and of course to stop all forms of violence against women. This treaty was signed on behalf of the UK government on 22nd July 1981 and it was duly ratified on 7thApr 1986.

The United States on the other hand, has the questionable
honour of being in the company of six other countries: Iran, Sudan, South
Sudan, Somalia, Palau and Tonga, all of whom have so far refused to ratify this treaty, vital for the fair treatment of
women around the world. Take a moment to consider the scale of the hypocrisy
and this crime against women across the planet. The United States is the single
biggest trader and supplier of arms in the world. At the same time it is the largest
funder of the International Red Cross and other NGOs who provide medical aid in
conflict zones. The US “no abortion” policy for medical war-rape victims in conflict
zones, means women are left to attempt self-abortions, commit suicide and are
killed as a result of ‘honour’ based violence in their families and
communities. Perhaps the most worrying fact of all is that according to high level
UN reports and claims by senior UN officials, sexual violence in armed
conflicts around the world is only increasing[ii].

Today,
the denial of necessary abortions for victims of rape in war, resulting from the
barbaric practice of targeting girls for forced pregnancy as an element of genocide,
must itself be considered barbaric
and entirely uncivilised. It cannot be right that a policy from one single
nation can compromise the legal obligation of the United Kingdom to allow for
their treatment, insofar as it can ever really
be treated.

Each year in England and Wales it is estimated that there are
a million female victims of domestic abuse[iii]and 80,000 female victims of rape[iv]. Those women,
who conceive as a result of the rape have, quite properly, the option to abort
that pregnancy. In comparison, approximately one and a half million women are
raped every year in the US[v] and in 31 states where a
woman becomes pregnant due to rape, the rapist can actually sue for visitation
rights[vi]. Following on from the horrific rape in Delhi
last year, questions are now being asked of the Indian government and their
approach to rape. This is an Indian government who wishes for us to accept that,
in a country of over a billion people, there are 21,000 rapes a year[vii] which incidentally,
excludes the many thousands of rapes from conflicts such as Kashmir. In other nations in the Indian subcontinent
and elsewhere, the scale of the global rape pandemic affecting them
domestically goes simply unrecorded. In some nations, a culture of patriarchy
and fear, of unenlightened civic and religious leadership, leads to the
stigmatisation and marginalisation of women who are left unable to report rape,
let alone to have treatment or see justice served. It was not long ago that
such barbaric scenes were witnessed in Europe, with the Serbian rape campaign
in Bosnia in the early 1990s[viii].

In light
of the scale of conflicts around the globe, many of which afflict Muslim
majority countries as a result of war-rape in places such as Syria[ix];
there should be no support for the denial of abortion either by society, or as
it currently stands, medical services funded by the US. Although according to
Islamic law, it is considered impermissible save for the most limited of
circumstances to abort a pregnancy after the entry of the soul into the foetus[x]
(considered to occur at 120 days); in certain extreme circumstances, it is
entirely permitted to abort the pregnancy. These conditions include when the
woman conceives after being raped or when the mother’s life or health is in
danger[xi]
based on the Islamic juristic principle “If one is overtaken by two evils, one should choose
the lesser of the two”[xii].

In
2011, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in
Conflict, stated that ‘sexual violence
has become a tactic of choice for armed groups, being cheaper, more destructive
and easier to get away with than other methods of warfare’ [xiii]. That nothing has
changed since then, is a damning indictment not only on US policy but a British
policy which has specifically not challenged it.

The UK’s treatment of women in conflict zones cannot be
subject to the policy of a nation which has refused to ratify a Treaty eliminating
all forms of discrimination against women, when we have ratified it. Neither can the UK be subject to the policy of
a nation which allows for the discriminatory treatment of women who are raped
in wars. We must, as a society and as a
civilisation, reject all forms of violence against women. Where used as a tool
and a weapon of war, it is specifically designed to impede the advancement of
women and maintain their subordinate status. By destroying the lives of
mothers, you destroy the fabric of society. And this, is something that we can
never support.

[i] Elisabeth Rehn and
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Women, War and Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment
on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace Building (New
York: UNIFEM, 2002), 9, http://www.ucm.es/cont/descargas/documento7201.pdf
(accessed 8 June 2012).